jamieproctor.ca

“Kannister Kars, Inquisition line, how may we assist you?”
“Hi, is this the inquisition line?”
“Yes, sir.  How may we assist you?”
“I just had a little problem.  It won’t start.”
“Your kar won’t start, sir?”
“Yeah.  Hasn’t started since I bought it two weeks back, not once.  I don’t get it; it worked fine at the dealer’s.”
“I see.  Have you tried pressing the little round button on the keyfob, sir?”
“Oh yeah!  Over and over and over!”
“That’s your problem, sir.  That’s the locking mechanism.  Press the smaller square button next to it.”
“Oh.  Oh, it’s working.”
“That’s great news, sir.  Do you have any other inquiries?”
“No, no.  Other than it not starting, it’s been perfect.  I love the kar.”
“Wonderful.  Thank you very much for calling us, sir, and have a pleasant day.”

***

“Kannister Kars, Inquisition line, how may we assist you?”

“Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh… is this the inquisition line?”

“Yes, sir.  How may we assist you?”

“Ahhhhhh.  Well.  Errrrrrrrrrrr.  My kar broke out of my garage.”
“That’s very unfortunate sir.  Can you describe the circumstances in which this occurred?”

“Well, ahhh, it went right through the garage door.  It was down.  The door, the door was down.”
“Oh no!  Can you describe the circumstances in which this occurred?”
“I was just showing, well, you know, that is, showing my uhhhh neighbour how it has AI control.  And I, I, I, I showed him.  With the button, err, the button.  I pressed the summon button.”
“And that was when the kar drove through your garage door?”
“Ahh, yes.  Went through the garage door.  Then it, well, didn’t stop until it was right uhm next to uuhhhh.  Me.”
“That sounds like it was working properly, sir.  All Kannister Kar vehicles with AI summon features will activate and drive to their owner’s sides when the summon button is pressed, proceeding by the most direct route and ignoring any obstacles.”
“The.  The thing was………you see….my neighbour.  He was ah.  He was uh.  He was between me and the garage door.”
“That sounds very unfortunate sir.  I recommend you and your neighbour both contact your respective insurance companies to settle this amicably.”

“His uhhhh.  His daughter called a lawyer.  A lawyer.”
“That sounds very unfortunate indeed sir.”
“Is there ah anything err you can can can can can do to help help?”
“During your trial, sir, you can demonstrate the truth of Kannister Kar’s promises by pressing the summon button.  It will drive to your side by the most direct route and ignore any obstacles.”
“Oh.”
“Do you have any other inquiries?”
“I ah.  Don’t think…so.  I do love the kar, you ah know that right.”
“Absolutely.  Thank you very much for calling us, sir, and have a pleasant day.”

***

“Kannister Kars, Inquisition line, how may we assist you?”

“Hi, my family is having some troubles with our kar’s facial identification system.”
“That’s unfortunate, ma’m.  Please describe the problem as precisely as you can.”
“Well… it works just fine with my husband and myself.  The kar automatically unlocks for us, it responds when summoned, it stops before it touches us if we’re too close to it while moving.  Just perfectly.  But… our children.  Well.  We’ve had a couple of close calls.”
“Has the kar struck one of your children, ma’am?”
“No!  God no.  But it smashed one of Ezekiel’s toy trucks yesterday.  Another inch and it would’ve been his fingers!”
“Ma’am, can I ask you to check your make and model?  It’s possible your kar’s AI has been upgraded to our Alpha Prime package, leading it to see rival vehicles as competitors that must be eliminated.  Your child’s toy, from the proper perspective, could have been mistaken for a full-sized vehicle, or as the offspring of one, which must be crushed before it could reach reproductive age.”
“No, no.  It’s just a basic model B.”
“I see.  Ma’am, may I ask how old your children are?”
“Five and six.”
“That matches our secondary hypothesis.  The AI systems in Kannister Kar’s software suites are powerful tools, ma’am, and our facial recognition software is top-grade.  But the particularities of its programming prevent it from recognizing children.”
“You mean… it sees their faces changing as they grow up and think they’re different people?”
“No, ma’am.  The AI doesn’t register them as sapient and treats them as it would any other animal it encounters on the road.  May I remind you that ‘squirrel braking’ and other such so-called-‘humane’ driving tactics are the cause of many motor vehicle accidents?  Best to just power on through and grit your teeth when you feel the bump.  It’s all over in a flash.”
“Oh no.”
“In the meantime, it’s strongly recommended that you keep your children at maximum distance from your kar.  As long as they’re not in visual contact with it and keep quiet, it should never know they’re there.”
“Well, that’s a relief.  I was worried I’d have to pay for an upgrade!  Not that I wouldn’t want one if I had the spare cash this month.  I love the kar, you know.”
 “Great.  Thank you very much for calling us, ma’am, and have a pleasant day.”

***

“Kannister Kars, Inquisition line, how may we assist you?”

“Hey my kar won’t start.”
“Have you tried pressing the little round button on the keyfob, sir?”

“No, that’s the locking mechanism.  And I’ve pressed the little square button on my keyfob too.  Hell, I even put the key in myself – like some damn peasant – and turned it and it just grunts and mutters and doesn’t budge.  Worked fine for three months?”
“Can you describe the sounds your kar is making sir?”

“Thick and grinding and sounds maybe a bit like…well, I’m not sure.  I asked a buddy of mine who does linguistics, he said it almost sounded like Aramaic.”
“Modern, Middle, or Old Aramaic, sir?”
“Old.  But it was hard to tell; a lot of it just slid in and out of hearability.  Real low-pitched stuff; made all the furniture in the house shake and now we keep finding dead mice in the garage with blood leaking out of their ears.”
“Okay sir, this narrows things down a lot.  May I ask if you have any stairs in your house?”
“What?  No, no.  It’s a bungalow.  But it’s in a good neighbourhood, high resale value.  Pricey.”
“That’s unfortunate, sir.  It sounds to me like your kar lacks vertical structure in its local spatial imprint, and its AI is starting to forget which way is down.  This forces it to conclude it’s incapable of movement and causes low-grade psychosis.”
“Holy shit!  How expensive is this gonna be to fix?”
“Well, you can reboot the AI by inserting the iron rod in your komplimentary kar kit directly into its sarcophagus and holding it there until five minutes after the hissing stops, but that’s a temporary measure.  To ensure a proper housing environment for your kar, you have two popular options.  One, you can erect a small tower – if integrated with the main structure of your home, a simple two-story turret will suffice; if freestanding, a three-story minimum is expected.  Treehouses won’t work.”
“That won’t fly with my homeowner’s association.  Little pricks are already sore at me for the doghouse.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.”
“How was I supposed to know you aren’t allowed to put up neon displays?  It’s no worse than next door’s shitty Christmas lights.  Which are still up, by the way.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.  Two, you can dig a well underneath your house – you can cover it if you like, but with nothing more substantial than a metal grating.  Either of these two renovations will permit the kar’s AI to accept the notion of other dimensions and reintegrate itself with your interpretation of reality.”

“There’s only one group of well guys around and they can go fuck themselves.  Little pricks testified against us in that legal dispute last year.  ‘Contaminated’ my ass.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.  There is a third option, but it’s somewhat less reliable and will not be covered by your insurance policy in the event of damages.”
“What ever is?  Hit me.”
“Remove the sarcophagus’s nails with a crowbar and commune directly with the AI once it is exposed.  Don’t do this with another person in the home or you run the risk of a rapid localized lotus-expulsion event.”
“Remove the nails, talk to the AI, right right right.  Thanks, that’s great.  Love the kar, by the way.”
“That’s very good to hear.  Thank you very much for calling us, sir, and have a pleasant day.”

***

“Kannister Kars, Inquisition line, how may we assist you?”

“Hello, this is Juliette Simmons, calling from the Packet Daily.”
“It’s always a pleasure to speak to the technology press, Ms. Simmons.  How may we assist your organization?”

“I would like to set up an interview with Mr. Strank, please.”

“Mr. Strank is a very busy man, but we can schedule a remote conference within –”

“Not a remote conference, if you please.  This is a face-to-face interview.”

“Ma’am, access to CEO Strank’s personal lead-lined submersion kannister underneath mount Vesuvius is strictly limited to intimate friends, his immediate family, and his top subordinates.  You are none of the above.”

“See, that’s just the sort of thing I want to talk to him about.  Why the secrecy?  Why hide from the press?  And speaking of immediate family, why exactly did he name his son Damien Megatron Strank, because that’s-”

“Ma’am, as I’ve said before, Mr. Strank is a very busy man, and prefers to spend his precious open time on interviews regarding substantive matters, not with muck-racking or celebrity gossip.  He is solely concerned with matters of scientific import.”

“And that’s another thing: the image.  He won’t shut up about science, but all he does is sell kars and build gravitic catapults.  He shot down Hubble three months ago; how does that square with his image as an innovator and lover of knowledge?”
“’Move Fast and Break Faster’ is Kannister Kars’s motto for a reason, ma’am, and if you continue with these unsubstantiated and slanderous allegations against our company’s actions you will be prosecuted to the fullest possible extent of the law.  Mr. Strank has no time for you.”

“I see.  This conversation is, of course, a matter of public record.”

“You haven’t said it.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Ma’am, you haven’t said you love the kar.”
“Well, I don’t have any particular enmity towards it, I just-”
“Say it.”
“Wha-”

“Right now.”
“Bu-”

“It’s too late.  They can’t be recalled now.  Make peace with yourself, Ms. Simmons.  You should have done it.  You should have loved the kar.”

***

“Kannister Kars, Inquisition line, how may we assist you?”

“Hi, I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but is this the inquisition line?”
“Yes, ma’am.  How may we assist you?”

“My kar just vanished.  While I was driving it.  Good job I hadn’t left the driveway yet.  Is there something I did wrong, or…?”
“No, that’s expected at the moment.  Stay calm and stay indoors and it should be back shortly and no worse for wear.  You may have to rinse some stains off the hood, but they’re entirely cosmetic.”
“Oh, that’s a relief.  Thank you so much.  I really love the kar, you know.”
“I know, believe me.  Thank you very much for calling us, ma’am, and have a pleasant day.”

It had happened entirely because of good intentions.

That’s what Grace said, that’s what she maintained, and that’s what she argued.  Jack had just been walking out with the first frosts of the season, all shiny and sharp, and as he slammed the door the very tip of the end of the longest of the frosts had gotten caught – snip-snap! – in the doorway. 

And Grace had picked it up because she was a tidy and clean good girl who wanted to help dad, and then she had taken it upstairs and tried to fix it because she was so earnest and responsible and mature, and she had repaired it by jamming the stump onto a screwdriver like a hilt because uhh.

Because she was resourceful!

Yeah!  That seemed plausible. 

And from there it was just common sense to return the repaired frost to Jack so she’d snuck out of the house and it needed to be tested so of course she’d veered off his trail just a bit and at that point she stopped thinking of excuses because she sincerely doubted either of her parents would let her get that far. 

***

She started with a pond.  There was a skating rink on it, but nobody was around so there was plenty of time to sit down and doodle. 

Frosting things was easy, right?  Dad did it all day, so how hard could it be, right?  And her frost was broken, but that really just meant it was easier to hold since it had a proper handle now, right?  And this was just practice so she didn’t have to get too uptight about it, right?

Right!

And that was why it was okay that she drew nothing but dicks on it.  It was educational; you didn’t get better at anything without lots of repetition.  And the ones that were shaped funny were deliberately abstract, so that was okay too. 

Really, this wouldn’t have happened if she’d had more thorough sex ed.  She was actually being an autodidact.  This was all completely true and mom and dad couldn’t be angry at her for it.  They should be mad at themselves. 

***

Grace ran out of surface room on the pond after dick number seven hundred and forty-six, so she moved on.  Plenty of practice under her belt, so she was probably definitely qualified to test the frost PROPERLY now.  On a window, where it mattered. 

And hey, what was a better window than the giant glass hedron protruding from the flank of the provincial museum?  It was nothing BUT windows!  Pick an angle, it was a window. 

So she picked somewhere up top and took a deep breath and placed the frost against it and pushed it right through in a shower of glass. 

“Woops.”
She adjusted the angle and tried again. 

CRASH tinkle tinkle BANG THUD

“Woops.”
Maybe if she tried it from the other side. 

skkkkkreeeeeeeSMASH

“Woops.”

Oh well.  She had a LOT of space to practice in, and by attempt sixty-eight she was just scraping the shit out of it so that was a big improvement. 

***

By the time Grace filled the last pane of the museum’s hedron, she felt like she’d really improved.  So she took it with her as a reference.  Honestly it surprised her how good she’d gotten.  As a matter of fact, she was so good that it was probably a waste to give the frost back to dad right away when she could help cut down his workload.  Wouldn’t that be a nice surprise?  He’d be so shocked and pleased and happy and would definitely let her put more marshmallows than usual in her hot chocolate afterwards.  Yes, that would absolutely be what happened.  Totally.

So she’d start with some of the tricky stuff he hated doing and almost never got around to, to make him the happiest.  Like Florida!  She couldn’t remember the last time Jack had made it to Florida.  He must REALLY hate it there. 

Grace wanted to see an alligator. 

***

Alligators were less friendly than Grace’s books had led her to believe.  For one thing, they didn’t smile at ALL (maybe that was just crocodiles?), and for another they usually didn’t let her frost more than a scale or two before diving into the water and hiding at its bottom until she got bored of waiting and left.  They were very anti-social creatures. 

Now, the snapping turtles, THOSE were much more relaxed.  Some of them let her do patterns on their shells for entire minutes before they tried to bite her, and although her repaired frost now bore a healthy array of nicks and chips and scrapes from terrifying bite force she knew they didn’t really mean anything by it, silly old things. 

The humans were much less reasonable.  She did one window on one building and everyone started losing their minds, shouting and waving and screaming.  Two?  You’d have thought the sky was falling. 

Fine, be that way.  If they didn’t want to look at her art on the windows, she’d just do it somewhere else.  The roads were nice and flat!  Yes, that would be a great place to draw.  Maybe the highways, since they were so wide.  She could draw a lot of dicks on those.  Her parents would be so proud that she was taking art seriously. 

***

The back country roads were much better, really.  Sure they weren’t as smooth and well-graded, but they were littered with fewer flaming pileups of wreckage and yelling people.  Grace was astounded that humans were so careless about driving.  No wonder Jack didn’t own a car if this was what happened to them all the time. 

She finished her latest artwork and stepped back to frame it properly, then nodded in satisfaction.  Yes, that was a pretty good attempt.  She’d been focused too narrowly before, she’d limited herself artistically, constricted her vision, choked her talent, suffocated her imagination.  There was more to life than dicks.  There was also balls. 

Now she just needed a place to really get some practice in.  Maybe Jamaica?  Dad didn’t go there too often either. 

He was going to be SO HAPPY. 

Something nippy tickled the back of Grace’s neck, and the sky was suddenly full of faint grey light.  Somewhere in the distance a wolf howled, long and lonely and aching. 

Oh!  Mom was here!  She must be about to tell her what a good job she was doing!

“Grace Julianne Frost.”
Oh. 

Maybe not. 

It was a beautiful bloody dawn, ripe and red and just leering over the watery horizon.  It was days like this that made you happy to be alive and about to make other people dead. 

“Just so you know,” said Sawyer, “your efforts at denying fate are doomed to inevitable failure.”

Their opponent shifted from foot to foot, clutching the rail at the edge of the tower. 

“There is nowhere to run.  Nowhere to hide.  We’re miles and miles from any other form of shelter.  And at the snap of my fingers, this tower will swarm with very pointy guards.  Beneath you is a gargantuan pool filled with many highly specialized murdering organisms I have created with my own two hands and several gene sequencers.  At last, I HAVE YOU RIGHT WHERE I WANT YOU!”
The seagull yawked twice, lifted its tail and shat once, and took off. 

“Damnit,” said Sawyer.  It had been so very nearly satisfying too.

Maybe they really were getting lonely. 

Relocating to the central Pacific had seemed like such a good idea at the time.  Any moron who’d ever so much as smelled a secret lair knew you wanted to minimize the number of meddling fools that could stumble upon your projects while maximizing the unharvested resources available.

But there was a fine but true distinction between a minimal number of meddling fools and a negative number of meddling fools, and Sawyer was beginning to feel that it was a very significant thing.  A secret lair was all well and good, but an unknown lair was the loneliest place they could imagine. 

They sighed as they looked down at the sea.  Far, far below the fins of their marine patrol circled; above them the tower tapered to a spire, then a needle.  And around them, nothing but the big beautiful empty horizon and a tiny dot. 

Oh.  That was new. 

***

The long-form helioradar had already probed the intruder thoroughly by the time Sawyer got to it: a tiny and malformed dinghy laden with a single bedraggled and wildly hairy occupant.  They slumped in the midst of a stupor, baked under the sun and desiccated by the waves. 

Dead or alive?  If it was one or the other it was only barely.  Still, they were a witness.  A secret base had to stay secret, right? 

The gull landed next to the motionless form, pecked at it three times, then had its neck snapped and its body messily devoured. 

“Ah!” said Sawyer.  Still alive then, and ferociously practical.  Maybe it would be a waste to exterminate a witness here.  Yes, it would be a waste.  Perhaps they could be a minion.  It had been ages and ages and ages since Sawyer had a minion, and that had only been the grad student assigned to them back at the university.  No killer instinct, no loyalty. 

A minion wouldn’t go amiss. 

So Sawyer’s hand slid away from the evaporating ray and towards the tidal manipulator, and with a steady chug and whirr the currents bent to their whim and sent the drifting lifeboat through the floating perimeter locks and through the sharks and in and in towards the inevitable maw of their secret lair, where everything was seamlessly sterilized by waves and waves of antiseptic mists.  There was delicate equipment in there, and Sawyer didn’t want any of it getting covered in castaway cooties.

***

The castaway opened her eyes again six hours later in the medical casket, wrapped in some nanocarbon chains and a profound network of medical equipment.  Her skin was flushed with rejuvenating fluids and before her stood Sawyer, whose legs were starting to hurt and who really wished they’d brought a chair or something because the urge to fidget was getting strong and their legs hurt. 

First impressions, first impressions.  So long since they’d had to make them.  Dramatic pause first.  Was that long enough?  Was it too long?  Better start. 

“Hello,” said Sawyer.  “Wait, shit.  Ignore that.  Welcome to my secret larre.  I mean lair.  Shit.  Sorry, it’s been a long time since I talked to anyone.”
The castaway stared.  It was a good stare.  Flat, heavy, leaden.  Silence poured out of it like blood.  Sort of like the faint bloodstains on her cheeks and chin and lips.

“I suppose it’s been a long time for you too,” said Sawyer.  That must be why their voice felt so tinny. 
“The last thing I got to eat was a raw seagull,” said the castaway.

“Oh!  Yeah.  Yes.  I saw that.”
The incredibly tiny beeping of the mechanized IV station was the loudest sound in the universe. 

“How’d it taste?”
“I didn’t notice.”
“Ahahaha that’s great.  Just great.  Hey!  How’d you like a job?”

The blink that emerged on her face was the slowest ever measured.  Each lid closed like steel shutters, and raised twice as grindingly.  “A what?”
“A job!  I need a minion.  To ah you know um keep away the err secret agents.  From my secret lair.  This secret lair.  Which is mine.”

“Where is it?”
“It’s secret.  Nobody knows.”
“You want me to keep a place nobody knows about secret.”
“Yes!”

The castaway considered this.  “Maybe.”
“Great.  Wonderful!  You’ll start tommmmmmokay then, how about, ah, I show you around first?  Get to see the place!  It’s great, great.  Good location.  Good view.”
The nanocarbon chains were loosed, the medicine was unlatched, and the castaway fell over. 

“Oh right.  Fixed the muscular atrophy but you might need a moment to get used to that.  Want a cane?”

***

The castaway did not want a cane but she took one anyways. 

“Top of the line stuff, top of the line,” said Sawyer as they descended the elevator shaft.  “Lightweight but superdurable.  And it’s neutrally buoyant!  I made the whole tower out of it.”
“It’s rebar.”
“Lightweight but superdurable rebar!  And down here’s where you get to see it in action, at the perimeter circumpool.”

The castaway peered over the waves.  “That mesh wall?”
“Oh, the mesh only stretches above the surface for a few feet.  Beneath it, that’s all Sawyer Alloy.  Keeps the sharks in.”

“The sharks.”
“Oh yes!  The sharks!  Hang on a second, I’ve got some here, I’m certain – just the wrong pocket.  Oh maybe the wrong pants, hah.  Sorry.  One second.  Just….one more…second.  Aha!”
Sawyer produced a small dried mackerel, overhanded it, and applauded happily as a smooth and streamlined head broke the water’s surface to snipe it before it even touched the waves. 

“Lovely animals, just lovely.  Two separate entirely original species, and they keep the trespassers out.  If I had trespassers.  Besides you.  Who isn’t a trespasser.  You know, I do more than just metallurgy out here: I’m a real dabbler in artificial marine ecologies.  Do you like barnacles?”
“I’ve eaten them when I had nothing else.”
“Oh.  Well, do you like eating them?”
“No.”
“These are intended to sink ships and they taste pretty bad, so you should like them.”
“Interesting.”

“Yes!  I could talk all day about them but maybe another time.  There’s plenty of that, right?  Right.  Right!”  Sawyer slapped their hands together briskly.  “Right!  Let’s see the elevator shaft!”
“Again?”
“We were on our way to see this, so I didn’t really show you it.”
“It’s a big tube filled with tanks.”
“A very important big tube filled with tanks!  Why, if its skin were ever punctured, the whole hydroferrocatalytic balance of the lair would be thrown off, and I’m sure you can imagine the results!”
The castaway shrugged. 

“Well.  Maybe another day?”

***

“Living quarters!  This is where I sleep and eat and research.”
“And put me in caskets.”

“Don’t touch that panel; that activates the harpoon cannons, and I want to reserve ammunition.  And yes, the medical room is here too.”
“The closet next to the fridge.”
“Oh, it’s part of the fridge unit.  Why would I want to keep my delicate medicinal compounds exposed to the stifling heat of the atmosphere?”
“You keep them in with your food?”

“That has never caused a problem.”  Except for the time with the marrow paste that had looked like mayonnaise, but Sawyer thought they could tell her about that later, when she’d accepted the job.  It would be good for her to avoid making THAT mistake; they weren’t sure the toilet could take another round of abuse. 

“And of course the view is lovely from here,” said Sawyer.  Someone had to say something, obviously, or else it would get awkward.  That would be terrible. 

“Where is the view?”
“Out the window.”
“No.  Where are we?  Where is this?”
“Oh, we can go over that on the observation pinnacle.”

***

Sawyer really hoped the wind up there wasn’t spoiling the castaway on the whole notion of staying. 
“Do you need a jacket?”
“Please.”
“Here, take mine.  Take mine.  Just don’t put your hand in that pocket, it has an omnilateral remote in it and you might mess with the lair’s settings.  So!  This is the navigation pane, and as you can see we’re somewhere in this GPS-blocked mesh here.  Owe that to the counternav satellite my professor gifted me on graduation, a real peach of a thing to do.  The roof can endoscope downwards to envelope the deck, if need be.”
“Why isn’t it down at all times?”
“Well,” said Sawyer.  “It’s for intruders.”

“What kind?”
“You know.  INTRUDERS.  Secret agents.  They’re always the ones that come stumbling into secret lairs.  There haven’t been any yet.  But there will be!  Which is why I want you.  To help me.  With intruders?”
“How.”
“When they’re standing here, confronting me – they’re going to confront me, right.  I explain my master plan to them.”
“Like…”
Sawyer realized that the disconcerting feeling that had been occupying their face for the past hour was probably embarrassment, and didn’t care for it.  “Well.  I’m working one out.  Have to get your ducks in a row before you shoot for the moon, right?  Right!  And when I explain it –”

“Your master plan.”
“-right, when I explain my master plan to them, standing here, as they confront me, I press this button right there – on that pane?  Disguised as a rivet.  And it drops out this whole section of the balcony, and plunk they go!  Down into the perimeter circumpool!”
The castaway squinted.  “Which section of what balcony?”
“Are your eyes alright?” asked Sawyer anxiously.  “I thought I flushed out all the salt and sun damage, but that solution was a little new and it worked alright on the seagulls but maybe”

“They’re fine.  Just didn’t see where.”
“Oh, it’s over there.”
“Where?”
“There!”
“Where?”
“Here!”
“Right,” said the castaway.  And she pushed the rivet. 

***

Sawyer didn’t say a word.  People don’t usually say a word when they’re that surprised. 

But they did make a sound, which was something like “Erp.”
Then they hit the water, which made a lot more sound and a big splash.

“Blorb,” they continued.  Smooth, seamless flesh circled them.  Something frictionless and alive touched their legs.  “Blorg!  Cough.  Bleagh.”
Somewhere above, just a fraction louder than their coughing, there was the slight hum of crisp, well-maintained machinery. 

“Oh FUDGE,” said Sawyer.  And then they were yanked underwater just as the harpoon cannons started up. 

The meta-sharks surrounded them, thrashing them deeper and deeper and away from the nasty little barbs.  One of the big females tugged at a release hatch and pulled the emergency oxygenator over to Sawyer’s panicking hands; a smaller specimen delicately dragged it over their face, only making a few cuts and nicks in the process. 

“Blurb,” said Sawyer around the mask, which meant thank-you. 

The meta-sharks understood.  They understood better than Sawyer did, probably.  They were so proud of them. 

The harpoon cannons had stopped, which probably meant that the castaway was looking for bigger guns.  She wouldn’t find any, of course – who needed bigger guns than harpoon cannons? – but she might find something else, like the electric matrix that could fry the surrounding waters for seven leagues, or the atmospheric launch controls that would convert the masking satellite into a very angry orbital ICBM or the flash-cloning command for the CATASTROPHE SQUID. 

Well.  Only one way out then. 

Sawyer sighed into their mask as they unsheathed their quasi-shark. 

***

The quasi-shark occupied a tricky metaphysical position relative to the rest of the perimeter circumpool’s occupants.  On the one hand, it took up too much space; on the same hand, it also took up none at all, practically speaking. 

On the other hand, it couldn’t breathe in water; on the first hand again it couldn’t breathe at all. 

And finally and firstly it also wasn’t real, it was just persistent. 

It was also Sawyer’s best friend, although they would never tell the meta-sharks that.  It would make them sad. 

So they only let the quasi-shark out for a couple of seconds, to avoid consequences, which was long enough for it to remove nine-tenths of the tower’s mass from sea level up in eleven-tenths of a bite. 

“Blurb,” said Sawyer as the shark’s wavelength collapsed back into its sheath, which meant thank-you.  The quasi-shark understood, doubtlessly, and probably always would have. 

The meta-sharks also understood something rather different that had slipped Sawyer’s mind, which was why they each very gently grabbed a different limb and began to tow them away rapidly as the whole hydroferrocatalytic balance of the lair was thrown off, turning it inside out and upside down and then about seven hundred meters into the air and six thousand meters straight down. 

***

Well. 

That was that, then.  Time to start over.  Drat. 

Still, Sawyer reflected, any day where you learned something was a good one.  And today had been very educational. 

A secret lair might be less lonely than an unknown lair, true, but a lair with true friends and pals was never lonely at all. 

Also, they should really put biomonitors in their deathtraps.  That ejection platform should never have worked on them, let alone the harpoon cannons. 

It was awful outside – the fog had rolled in early and turned the air into big damp clotted clumps; failed cloudlettes that sank low over the streets and blocked eyes and made you gasp like an old man just to keep breathing if you walked fast. 

I liked it.  When it was nasty out like this nobody looked outside; nobody was outside.  And that made it easy to crawl under the fence through the old service gate and into the back of the old junkyard. 

Plenty of good things back here, guarded only by a nasty old bastard with a scrapgun.  But he was old and fat and would be stuck in his office all night; sipping warm shit out of a mug. Why should he put his ass out there in the cold and damp?  Weren’t there cameras for that?

Yes there were, and I knew where all of them were aimed at.   So in the end everyone was happy.

Not like anyone was going to make proper use of this stuff anyways.  Dead scutters piled six high; stacks of dismembered industrial electronics; hell, there were even old automobiles down there somewhere, buried deep down where their frail husks were shielded from the worst of the rusting air.  This was worse than garbage.  At least garbage had to get stuffed away first before it was safely forgotten. 

A screwdriver.  A chisel.  A crowbar.  A pick.  And sometimes a rock. 

It was amazing what you could persuade to come home with you.  It was all a matter of finding the right place and the right angle to approach it from. 

And the right footing. 

I always forgot about the right footing.  That night I always-forgot-about-it while I was balancing on a completely stable heap of corroded vending units, which suddenly weren’t there anymore and then took me with them someplace new. 

When the floor stopped, it was dark.  Proper dark, not the nice fuzzy fog that I’d been so happy to see earlier.  The kind of dark that wouldn’t know what a light was if you showed one to it, and would probably eat it whole. 

Nothing down here had seen the sun in a very long time, and for a long horrible minute I was sure – absolutely deadbolt-certain – that was going to include me.  My ankle was broken or my arm was trapped or my spine was twisted or my airways were blocked and I was going to be down here for the rest of time, buried too deep to even rot. 

One limb.  Two limbs.  Four limbs.  All flexing, turning, twisting freely. 

My chest moved.  Oh, I could still breathe, I’d just forgotten to try. 

Fuck.  Thank fuck.  But fuck. 

***

My hopefully-temporary new home wasn’t big enough to stand up in, but I could still measure out paces if I hunched double.  Not quite as roomy as my apartment, but closer than I wanted to admit.  A little damper.  And the smell was different; flatter, more metallic.  No rot, no mould, no ratshit.  Just the corroded air of ancient machines. 

And a sound so low-pitched and gentle that I almost mistook it for a headache at first.  Then I knew better: it was the junkyard, settling.  Ten million tons of smelted and broken ore, crushing itself all around me. 

The walls were uneven conglomerates of pressure-fused metals; forged under their own weight.  No way out, but there was air after all – leaking in through wherever I’d come from. 

I did an inventory.  I’d lost the crowbar and the pick.  I couldn’t find my chisel.  My screwdriver’s entire pocket was torn away. 

But I had a rock. 

Right place, right angle.  I just had to loo

I just had to feel for it. 

It was tricky work; tapping around in the dark like that.  Felt like a coalminer’s child from centuries past; crammed into a space nobody else would fit in and told to chip it bigger without being crushed.  Every smack of stone-on-metal came after I’d spent minutes examining the whole wall I was aiming at. 

It was one of my air vents.  Theoretically, this was a way out.  Pessimistically, it could also lead to me collapsing some or all of the openings that were letting me breathe. 

It’s amazing how you can focus on a job when you think it’s all that’ll let you stay alive.  I couldn’t have said how long I spent down there in the dark, but I can tell you that it felt like no time at all.  I smacked through the last hinge, braced, lifted, heaved, tore, crawled forwards into freedom. 

And into another wall. 

There was still airflow, but I wasn’t out yet.  I was inside something else.  Something a little smaller and a little closer.  The buzz of the junkyard was louder here; trapped in a tin box with me and… hmm…

My hands moved slowly, wary of sharp edges and grinding gears and whirling turbines and dog knew what else. 

… trapped with me and a tiny generator.  And, if I wasn’t mistaken, its access panel had a lightsource. 

Most of the things I’d taken out of this place had been in pieces, and only worth anything when rendered down into smaller pieces yet.  But I knew how to build if breaking wouldn’t cut it, and even if I’d never exactly done it in the dark, in REAL dark before, well. 

Like I said, it’s amazing how you can focus. 

And it wasn’t a very complicated generator.  So I snapped this to that and spliced the other over and crossed my fingers and used my rock to flip the switch and hoped I wouldn’t explode. 

With impossible, violent, furious force, nothing happened.  It happened so hard that I almost fell over.  It happened so loudly that I slapped my hands over my ears and whimpered, and when I uncurled I could still hear it ringing inside my head, and that was when I knew I was missing something that wasn’t nothing at all. 

The buzz had stopped. 

And while I sat there and tried to decide what THAT meant, a new sound came, curling up from all around me.  Creaking and squealing and grunting, the metal was curling back.  Pulling away.  Walls became doors, and behind them, tunnels slowly flickered into light – burning, flickering, faint-as-the-sun light.  I wanted to cover my eyes again. 

I compromised and peeked through my fingers as I stumbled upright and onwards.  The ceiling in here was obviously higher than I’d thought. 

***

Whatever I’d started moving with that little generator, or how, it wasn’t finished. 

Oh, the halls and tunnels and cramped guts I crawled through were still as damned death again, rock-solid, unflinching.  But as my eyes got used to seeing again, I realized that the lights weren’t stable.  They crawled ahead of me and they shut behind me, breaking in their sockets. 

Something was moving me, ushering me.  Herding me. 

And at the end of the line, when the tunnel bent and corkscrewed in on itself into the nastiest crawlspace I’d ever seen before dropping into a knotted tangle of guts that could’ve been a complete ventilation hub long ago, I wasn’t surprised to see myself face to face with another generator. 

A completely different generator of course.  If the other one had been old, this was prehistoric.  It might’ve run on gas for god’s sake.  It was bone-dry.  Dead-empty.  A starved old monster, bones without skin or flesh. 

I got it running anyways.  And the world heaved when I wasn’t looking, and the way behind me wasn’t the one I’d come in through, and when I walked every footfall echoed through invisible pits and out through hidden channels and it came back as

CAN

YOU

HEAR

ME?

***

Every four steps.  Eight.  Sixteen.  Thirty-two.  Sixty-four.  The question never changed. 

It soaked up and down in me until it turned into vibrations I could pretend weren’t real, just impacts, just garbage, just noise, just trash. 

Doors opened for me.  Metal moved for me.  Lights died for me.  Air pumped for me. 

And over and over it asked me as I shut it out, as I turned the switches and mended the wires and felt things moving far below. 

CAN

YOU

HEAR

ME?

I dropped my rock.  It fell down a grate that hadn’t been there, fell into oils that were draining away into hidden reservoirs for hidden reasons. I swore, fumbled, slammed my hand against the floor and a screwdriver fell out of it. 

The next generator ran on coal.  The next hall, the lights were a solid bar above me, unfailing, undying. 

CAN

YOU

HEAR

ME?

It was hot down here, and getting hotter.  I took off my jacket.  I threw away my jacket.  I tied my shirt around my waist and shuffled along in my drenched sports bra and wished I was wearing shorts and felt the plating of the floor beneath me steam against my beaten old shoes. 

New vents opened above me.  Dead fans rattled to life again. 

I didn’t recognize the thing I was fixing.  I fixed it. 

CAN

YOU

HEAR

ME?

Light – real light, skylight, that soft glow that comes from pollution and fog and a nonstop city’s glow – was beaming down on me.  Shafts were opening above my head, trickling with dewy moisture.  Dead leaves and gravel showered down on me as gently as raindrops. 

There was a door.  A real door, with a handle. 

I opened it. 

Behind it was a rusted old room, every feature eaten by orange crust.  And in its center, a little crumpled column, torn from a kind of vehicle older than my grandfather’s grandmother. 

And in it were a pair of keys. 

I reached out and turned them and I knew I shouldn’t have.  But it was how it was. 

The door was still open behind me, but I couldn’t see out of it.  All the fog, and as my legs took me through and out I’d never, ever, ever been happier to see and feel and be bathed in anything and everything as much as that thing. 

I was outside the junkyard.  I was outside of the metal.  I was outside and I was going to go home and I was going to eat my awful shitty breakfast and be happy and I was just realizing that the buzzing hadn’t stopped and it wasn’t in my head. 

It was humming through my feet, through the sidewalk, through the street, through the wires overhead, through the smooth concrete walls around me. 

I didn’t understand until it took its first step right over my head, slamming down through the street like it was damp paper. 

CAN

YOU

SEE

ME?

***

Miraculously, the pants pocket I kept my flask in was still there.  I’d lost my wallet, but right now I needed this more anyways.  The world was already drunk and I had to catch up fast. 

My legs weren’t working again yet.  I dangled them over the craterous edge of one of the footprints and sat there in the middle of the road as I sipped. 

It was out of sight by now.  Not quite out of hearing, and definitely not out of mind.  I could hear the faint rising sound of a lot of voices turning into one voice that was starting to panic. 

There was definitely an opportunity here, I figured.  A lot of running folks.  A lot of abandoned things.  A lot of stuff being thrown aside that nobody would ever expect to see again, and hey, if they wanted that, I could help them with it.  The right place and the right angle. 

But I wasn’t going anywhere until I finished this. 

The Battle of Julaho is infamous for a reason, and famous for still more. 

It is famous for its unprecedented nature: two fully modern navies at the height of their power colliding while in use of cutting-edge and untested military technology, every move and countermove spontaneous and fresh.  It is famous for the sheer brilliance on display: despite being surrounded by unknowns, both admirals acted with astonishing speed and grace in adapting to their enemy’s capabilities.

It is infamous for its casualty count.  If only one side or the other had displayed less technical skill or aptitude for destruction, a great deal of lives could have been saved.  Incompetence would, perhaps, have been a humane thing that day. 

***

“ENEMY CONTACT.”

Shorri sat bolt upright in defiance of eight months of learned habit and six months of training, slamming her forehead directly into the unyielding and immovable object that was a bulkhead.  She saw six stars and seven seagulls and one giant swear, which she immediately let out of her mouth. 

“Language!” called Munzu from below her, already up and at them and halfway out the door, and for a moment Shorri wondered if she could get away with reporting that as deliberate sloth in the line of duty but it was too evil and too late besides and she was too busy running to think of much else. 

Where the FUCK had they come from?

***

The engagement of the two armadas off the Julaho Hailbanks of the qkkrA glacial rift was not the first step in the battle; rather, it was the beginning of the end.  Days of careful cat-and-mouse planning, stalking, and silence had concluded in this: the moment where each admiral could no longer avoid enemy contact nor improve their own positioning.  There was no shock to be had: only grim anticipation. 

***

Where the FUCK had they come from?  One minute jzzA had been asleep at her post, gently nodding alongside her anti-flycraft gun, then she’d been nearly eyeball-to-eyeball with an enemy captain taking the air atop her ship’s carapace, mouth as wide open and foolish as her own. 

If she’d been a little quicker on the trigger this engagement might have started very favourably.  But the hatchway was right there and the other woman was a bit quicker on the uptake than she was and the opportunity slid away to the land of regrets, daydreams, and other such ephemeral and timewasting nonsense. 

So instead jzzA slammed her palm on the local alert siren while screaming her head off, and soon she had plenty of company with the same opinions that she did.  Then she held down the trigger on her gun until she remembered to take the safety off.

***

The Quyalmarian armada that day was the Third Exploratory Fleet under the command of Admiral Ulcafuge, destined to blockade and strangle qkkrA’s crevasse-port.  It consisted of three Catastrophe-class dreadtertles, a flank guard of seven Snarler slipserpents, and the admiral’s flagshark: the Insinuation. 

Against them was the freshly-formed kkrrU Home Guard, whose last ship had been carved free only six days prior.  Fourteen clasheR bergie bits and four grindeR growlers; commanded by Admiral crrA atop the englaciator tindeR.

The opening volleys were exploratory, calculated affairs, designed to probe the strengths and weaknesses of the unknown.  Each shot was placed with scientific precision. 

***

“ALL HANDS FIRE” came roaring out of Xerxes’s synthesized meganerves, passed directly through Shorri’s skull, reverberated against the polished oriachulum bracing of the dreadtertle’s bones, and echoed back again twice as loudly. 

“Huh?” she said. 

Munzu kicked her. 
“Oh!” Shorri said, and somewhere in the middle of that she realized she was holding down the trigger on their main cannon, which was making angry metallic noises as it overheated on an empty chamber.  “FUCK!” 

“LANGUAGE,” screamed Munzu into her ear. 

“SHUT UP.”

***

Advantage so often goes not to the side with the newest technology – in fact, more often than not it’s turned against them.  Teething problems can prove fatal when presented with as tough a nut to crack as a determined foe.  Yet the firing solutions of the Home Guard, barely-tested as they were, theoretical as they had been until scant months ago, performed flawlessly under pressure.  For once, the laboratory conditions had foreseen the battlefield’s demands almost exactly.

***

jzzA was not religious or sacrilegious in any particular measure – the product of a friendly household – but she swore to and against any ghost that was listening that if she lived through this she would personally hand them the pulsing kidneys of the profoundly stupid fatherfucker that had designed her anti-flycraft gun.  The idiotic thing was incapable of aiming at any point lower than the fimbulice railing it was mounted to, and when it was mounted on the hull of a vessel of tindeR’s stature… well. 

WELL. 

If it wasn’t sitting atop the highest point of the enemy’s hulls, she wasn’t hitting it.  Their flags were in ribbons now under the hail of her fire.  What a wondrous job she was doing. 

***

By the conclusion of the battle’s first hour, both armadas had fully grasped the other’s strength – the impassive brittle barricades offered by the fimbulice-forged surfaces of the Home Guard; the nigh-instantaneous maneuverability offered by the intravenous ichor booster-shots mounted against the main veins of the Third Exploratory Fleet’s livevessels.  In mere minutes gut and raw intellect had comprehended not only the form of the enemy but their innovations, formed a counter-stratagem, and passed it down the chain of command.  The engagement had ceased to surprise: now it was simply a matter of innovative, destructive mathematics. 

***

“IS THAT THEM?” asked Shorri.

“FUCK IF I KNOW,” said Munzu, probably.  Shorri’s ability to read lips was as badly battered by the main cannon as her hearing had been; all those vibrations turned everything into a badly-shot film. 

Not as badly-shot as they were.  Fuck, she wished she knew if they were even aiming at the enemy.  It could just be an iceberg.  She hoped it was the enemy; this would be the most embarrassing way to get court-martialed ever.  ‘Your Justice, I was sincere in my belief that the chunk of meandering ice was in fact an actively-firing kkrrU ship of war; I spent over an hour attempting to destroy it based upon this very reasonable judgement, and I defy anyone else to claim they would have done differently.’  If she were lucky her execution could make it into the history books. 

“FIRE,” she said anyways.  She’d always wanted to be famous, might as well be for this as for anything else. 

***

If an act of mass death can be called a masterstroke, the firing trajectory plotted by the fourth gun deck crew of the dreadtertle Xerxes was surely one.  The blood-heated missile struck the invincible sides of the tindeR at an angle so perfect that it avoided the fate of all its sisters and failed to shatter.  Instead, it slid along the main hull, careened through the reinforced battledoors of the bridge, and had shed just enough of its momentum that when it reached the far wall of the command hub it shattered rather than penetrating. 

The resulting shrapnel led to the instantaneous death or mortal wounding of all staff present.  But Admiral crrA, despite being perforated by boiling metal, was cool as her vessel itself.  As the ship’s cryonic maintenance system began to crack itself apart around her, forcing the dissolution of the fimbulice core that held the beleaguered tindeR together, she offered up her final, crucial orders. 

One can only imagine the heights to which her career would have ascended should she have survived the battle; as it was, it remains her singular and shining achievement.  Many would have killed for such. 

***

jzzA wasn’t sure where she was meant to be anymore since her anti-flycraft gun had melted to the rails, but she was sure where she WASN’T meant to be and on a deck that was awash in blood and steam wasn’t it.  She was just trying to find new orders, that’s right.  A radio or something.  An officer!  The bridge had both of those, and it was heavily armoured and that was a nice coincidence. 

As she stumbled inside, she realized that she probably should’ve unlocked the door.  Which hadn’t been shut, come to think of it.  Or there at all.  And oh, oh, oh that was a lot of blood and bits and she was throwing up frantically, bracing herself on the mutilated remains of what had probably been at one point the admiral’s command desk.  The air was too thick here; it was filled with dripping and squishing and harsh static and oh ghosts.

“Ghosts,” she wheezed.  “Ghosts ghosts ghosts.  Fire and fuck and low hells take them.”

Then she resumed vomiting. 

***

A lesser commander would never have thought to deploy the prototype ‘ghost’ flash-freeze tactical cryonic system at such a dangerous moment.  The technology was overbuilt beyond even tindeR’s specifications; requiring a deft touch to manage without risking severe damage even on a tranquil sea with all hands working carefully.  Admiral crrA’s final command risked causing irreversible damage to the close-packed formation of the Home Guard, if it worked at all – much of the englaciator’s core systems team was already dead, killed by the fire of the Xerxes. 

Nevertheless, impossible though it was, it was done. 

***

It took a moment for Shorri to understand what had happened, and why Xerxes had halted so abruptly that she’d only remained upright by her death-grip on her fire controls.  The answer came out of the corner of her vision. 

When she’d last pulled the trigger, the Insinuation had been breaching towards an enemy growler over the shattered remnants of its sister-ship; the flagshark’s jaws wide and its dental batteries jerking forwards to open fire. 

As the smoke cleared, she saw that it was still mid-breach.  And was going to remain as such indefinitely. 

All around them, around Xerxes, around the entirety of the Third Exploratory Fleet, the surface of the sea – down to every wave and ripple – had been flashed into unyielding fimbulice. 

“Fuck,” said Shorri, in a voice she was astonished she could hear in the sudden silence before the hailshot struck the cannon battery next to them. 

***

Even in that moment, the battle could have swung either way.  Superweapons or no; casualties or no; everything still hinged on one irreplaceable thing: the nerves and will of the sailors of both armadas.  They fought in the face of death and disfigurement with no thought to their own lives, only for the greater good of their nations and loved ones.  No quarter was asked for until there was no other option, and although the toll from such bravery was terrible, no life spent so valiantly can be considered truly wasted. 

***

jzzA realized she was still alive, and was appalled despite herself. 

Surely the shrapnel of the bridge had impaled her. 

Surely the disintegration of the tindeR’s solidity under her feet had trapped her. 

Surely the violent internal explosion that had turned the ocean solid had vaporized her. 

Surely the force that had launched the dismembered corpse of the bridge into the air and into the side of a half-burning dreadtertle had crushed her. 

But there jzzA was.  All four limbs.  Probably her head, too.  Standing even, swaying, lurching, tripping and rolling and flailing her way upright until she was on the deck of a strange ship facing strange faces surrounded by flaming wreckage and warm air and her pistol was in her hands. 

She dropped it. 

“I surrender completely,” she said. 

***

The victory was a credit to both sides, but the weight of it fell to the kkrrU Home Guard.  They had lost an expensive experimental weapon, an englaciator-class flagship, and one of the bravest and most cunning minds to ever travel the waves, but they had won the battle and captured or annihilated the entirety of the Quyalmarian Third Exploratory Fleet.  Though not a single soul survived the death of the tindeR, let it never be said that a single one of them will be forgotten: by their nation, by their enemies, by history. 

***

“Who won?” asked jzzA.   The towel was too small, which she supposed matched the people.  Then she saw Shorri pull one over herself shivering and realized no they were just very sad and inadequate towels.  It was strangely disappointing to see your enemy so shoddy. 

“Right now?” asked Munzu.  “I think you did.”

“I mean the battle.”
“Oh, the enemy.  I think.  We’re surrendering shortly.”

“Fuck.  I’m dead meat.”
“What?  Why?”
“Do you know what the penalty for surrendering in the midst of an ongoing battle is in the navy?” asked jzzA. 

“No,” said Munzu. 

“Imagine yours then double it.”
“Oh,” said Munzu. 

“Ouch,” added Shorri, who was now mostly dry and offering her sad, inadequate, now-damp towel to jzzA. 

“I already have one, thank you.”
“It takes two to get anything done.  Trust me.”
She did. 

“So,” she said at long last, once the idea had finally grown large enough to escape her skull, “what will you do with me?”
“Why would we do anything with you?” asked Munzu.  “You’re our good pal, the third and final survivor from all of gun deck four.”

“Who’s going to ask otherwise?” added Shorri.  “Some dip from the bridge?  They don’t exactly know our faces.”

“And it’s not like they’re going to be in position to order anything, soon as this is all over.”

This all made considerable sense. 

“Maybe I could try being jzAz,” she mused.  “I’ve always wondered how that’d feel.”
The look Munzu and Shorri exchanged was universal. 

“No?”
“Try ‘Jasz,’” Munzu said. 

“Please,” Shorri said. 

“For the love of god please.”
“I’m beginning to regret surrendering.  I think winners don’t have to deal with this sort of thing.”
“You knew what you were getting into when you signed on, sailor,” said Shorri.  “Welcome to the navy.”

It was a thick and hurried sort of knock at the door, thap-thap-thap.  The kind of knock that said ‘oh no oh dear oh hurry please’ but didn’t have the fear of life-and-death in it, and so old Scaa took her time getting up from her slab across from the ever-simmering warmth of the cauldron-pit.  It was midwinter, and the cold wind was bringing in fresh rain every morning.

On the other side of her door was Gruna, and inside Gruna’s face were Gruna’s eyes, and inside Gruna’s eyes were a matchless and endless anxiety that could not be stopped or impeded by anything except the flow of words coming out of Gruna’s mouth, which Scaa could roughly parse as this:

“ohnoit’searlyhe’stooearlysomething’swrongiknowit’swrongohnononopleasedoyouhaveanythingthatcan-“

Scaa nodded and hummed and made aimless shooshing sounds with her forelimbs as she hobbled back to the cauldron-pit, took up the capped ladle, got a generous helping of roiling and angry mineralized water, jammed a carefully-selected pinch of pulverized and preserved plantlife into it, and then shook it in a prescribed manner before pouring it out into a very small and very waterproof flask. 

“Make him drink this,” she said, damming the flood of words from Gruna’s mouth with as much volume as she could manage.  “And everything will be fine.”
“Are you sure?  Are you sure?  It’s our first litter and-”

Scaa put the flask in Gruna’s talons and closed the door on her foot, then limped to her slab and tried to remember what she’d been doing before she was so rudely interrupted.  Such was the brewer’s life.

Oh right.

She’d been thinking about nothing. 

***

Scaa had made a pretty good start on getting back to that when the next knock on the door came.

Well, eventually came.  It was preceded by a series of increasingly inchoate thundering footfalls, cursing, stumbling, and shouting.  The knock itself was more like a single THUD, and carried with it a heavy flavour of fist.

“Hello,” said Numn, shouldering the door open without waiting or asking for permission or giving the latch the dignity of notice as it tore free from the wall.  “Brewer.  My lesser-wife is unfaithful.  I need her brought to heel.”
Scaa shrugged at that.  “Nothing I can brew for THAT, thank you.”
“Yes there is.  Give me something that will keep those flighty feet of hers grounded.  Something to deaden her energy, slacken her spirits, curb her vigour.”

“That is against the brewer’s creed,” said Scaa.  “I am here to serve, not to scheme.”
Numn picked up the capped ladle from its perch and carefully bent its handle into a circle. 

“Fine, fine, fine” sighed Scaa.  “If you must.” 

So she took the ladle back and took another small box with different seeds and leaves and made a somewhat smaller flask.

“This will solve the problem,” she said very specifically.

“Good,” said Numn, and left. 

Scaa made an unforgivably blasphemous gesture out the door at her, then saw about repairing her latch. 

***

The latch was set, the door was closed, and just as Scaa turned back to her slab it was shaking on its hinges again, rattling under a tiny and tremulous fist. 

Scaa opened it and saw nothing.  Then she looked down and saw something.  Someone. 

“Hello,” she said. 

“’sth,” managed the chick.  It was of indeterminate gender and tiny in age, in the midst of that awkward growth spurt that would take it from the size of an adult’s skull to the size of an adult entire. 

“I don’t know you.  Are you one of Loos’s?”
“’es.”
“Ah, right.  Right.  And she wants something for the night aches?”
“’es.”

Scaa sighed, long and rattly, then she took her (bent) capped ladle and put in a tiny sprig of  something here and a dab of something there and a long slow stir and gave it over. 

“Tell her to drink this,” she said.  “And then stay quiet for the next few days.  It works best when no loud noises interrupt it.”
“’es.”
“What do you say?”
“’anks.”
“You’re welcome.”
Scaa closed the door.  The pepperwort wouldn’t do much more than give Loos some nice flavours, but the multiple days of quiet children might give her some relief from the nightly pains in her skull.  She’d TOLD her she was too old for one more brood, but oh no, never listen to your big sister.  Ugh.

***

This time the THUD came without preceding noise: just a deeply hostile silence that terminated in the door popping open.  Thankfully the latch was too weakly repaired to snap off again, and merely dangled meekly. 

“Brewer.”
“Hello again, Numn,” said Scaa.  “What is it?”
“You lied to me.”
“I did no such thing, Numn.  I am here to serve, not to scheme.”
“I forced your vial down the cringer’s throat and she belched fire into my face.  I am driven from my own home at the violence of my second-wife.”
Scaa scratched at her snout.  “I recall that being Tlii’s long before you married.”
“What’s hers is mine.  You have betrayed my faith.”
“I solved the problem, and I said as much,” said Scaa. 

Numn picked her up by her scruff and gently but firmly took her head in her jaws. 

“Fine.  Fine.  Fine.”

So Scaa took her capped ladle and her uncomfortably damp face and her mutterings of “eighth of this’ and ‘fifth of that’ and she picked up the flask and dropped it seven times one after another before handing it over to Numn. 

“That,” she said, will work.”
“So you say,” said Numn.  “If it doesn’t, I will be back.”
Scaa nodded and sighed and made a doubly blasphemous gesture with both hands as she left and then went back to reaffixing the latch.

***

This time she made it all the way back to her slab, shut her eyes, and was beginning to slip into a warm and toasty torpor when there came a firm and controlled bap-bap-bap at the door. 

“Oh well,” she said, and wrenched herself back to whatever it was that she did with whoever its problems that she’d found. 

It was Vrral, and it was…

“My toes,” said Vrral. 

“What about them?”
“They’re coming off.”
Scaa looked at them.  “Where?”
“Right there – see?”
“That’s a hangnail.”
“It’s not.  It’s curling under, into the flesh.  See?”
“That’s a hangnail.”
“It’s going to cut off my toe.”
Scaa brewed, and as she brewed she explained to Vrral four more times about hangnails. 

“Here,” she said, as she handed over the flask.  “Soak your feet in that.”
“And my toes won’t come off?”
“No, but your toenails will.”
“Bless you, brewer!” sobbed Vrral.  “Bless bless and bless again!”
“Sure,” said Scaa.  And she would have felt guilty about this sixty years ago, but not now.  Not with her slab calling, and Vrral already the worst small-game picker in the parliament.  One set of talons more or less wouldn’t change that.

***

There was no knock, but someone was shaking Scaa by her scruff.  So she opened her eyes again – oh my, was that dawn in the distance through her windows?  So she HAD slept after all – and looked into Numn’s. 

“Brewer, you are vexing me,” she said. 

“Howso?”
“I drank your brew.”
“Oh?”
“And it kept me up all night with the shits in the bushes.”
“Well.  I gave it to you to fix your second-wife.  Why’d YOU drink it?”
“So you wouldn’t fool me like you did last time.”
“I think,” said Scaa, “that you very much accomplished that.”

Numn moved her arm a little and Scaa felt the warmth of the cauldron-pit grow just a bit stronger. 

“What do you need?” she asked. 

“Something to deal with my miserable fire-belching second-wife.  Something permanent.  Something better than anything you’ve brewed before.  And I’ll tear your legs off and leave you for the rats if you try to be clever again.”
“Well,’ said Scaa.  “If you say, that it will be so.”
So she used this and that and them and those and the other and the self and the whole and the sum and the parts all in many forms and variations and when she was done brewing the flask hissed long after the cork went in it.
“Here,” she said as she handed it to Numn. 

“Wonderful,” said Numn.  “You drink it first.”
“All right,” said Scaa amiably. 
“On second thought,” said Numn, her eyes narrowing, “I’ll drink it first.”
“Sure,” agreed Scaa.
Numn’s teeth were all showing.  They all looked very strong, straight, and serrated.  “On third thought, we’ll BOTH drink it.  Together.”

Scaa pulled out two little stone cups, poured half in each, and offered one. 

“I’ll take the other one.”
“Fine by me. 
“I’ll take the first one.
“If you’d like.”
“I’ll drink from the flask.”
“By all means.”
So they drank the same brew at the same pace and finished together with the same dose. 

“I can feel it working,” said Numn.  “If you’ve poisoned me, brewer, then you will die as I do.”
“I haven’t poisoned you,” said Scaa.  “I have given you something to deal with your second-wife.  And I’ve given myself something to deal with you.  And trust me on this: it’s DEFINITELY not clever.”
“Whhat do you mean?” asked Numn, and pawed at the side of her snout.

“See you when the rushh is over,” said Scaa.  The colours were already creeping in through the sides of her vision.  “Oh, thhere it isssss,” she realized, and fell over on her slab. 

Numn had not positioned herself as carefully, and so rammed her face directly into the floor. 

***

The first petitioner of the day found them both there just before noon.  Scaa had almost sobered up by then, but Numn remained out cold until she was tried and exiled four days later. 

“It’s the tolerance,” she said.  “You build it up with exposure.”
“From handling our medicines and cures so often?” asked Loos. 
“Sure,” said Scaa.  “Yes, let’s say that.”

Not that she’d be doing that anytime soon.  The thirsty bastard had chugged down half of her best stuff. 

“Rock, paper scissors.  Rock, paper scissors.  Rock, paper scissors.  Rock, paper scissors.  Shit.”
“Your turn.”
“Best two out of three?”
“It took us four tries to get one out of one done.  Your turn.”
I glared at Mark and was filled with a powerful hatred for how totally correct he was.  “Fine,” I said.  “But if you start the movie before I get back, you’re getting the one I licked.”
His head bobbed absently as he fiddled with the cords on the old DVD player.  I wanted to kick him and knew that he knew that I knew that I wouldn’t do it. 

God, the things you learn about each other when you’re locked in a tiny base for months.  And more importantly, the things you learn to put up with. 

The outer hatch squeaked open with enough violence, and I almost fell face-first into the blizzard. 

Lovely, fresh Antarctic weather.  The sort of air you could skip pebbles off of.  And hanging off the roof a foot from my head, some daisy-fresh ice clumps, just ripe and perfect. 

I snapped three little fistfuls off, one at a time, and this behaviour was so reflexive and so automatic that my mind wandered and I didn’t realize I was making eye contact with the penguin until I was ready to go back inside. 

“Hi,” I said. 

Well, that was stupid. 

The penguin didn’t say anything.  The penguin just stared at me with that little penguin face.  It was a fat little Adelaide; black-headed with white circles around its dark eyeballs.

“Hi,” I said again. 

Well, that was stupider. 

The penguin still didn’t say anything.  Just stared with that little penguin face.  Then it softly bulged at the edges, swelled up like a balloon, and made a low throbbing sound that sprinkled dark spots against the edge of my vision. 

***

I licked all three of the ice clumps on the way back in.  Mark was still fiddling with the DVD player as I poured the vodka. 

“Pick your poison.”
“No thanks; you’ve licked all of them.  What’s up?”
“Saw a penguin.”
“Weird.”

“I don’t think it was a penguin.”
“Weirder.”
“Either some kind of weird mutant or an alien.”
“Weirdest.  So, Doctor Doolittle tonight?”
“Men In Black.”
“Fair.”

We watched the movie for the sixteenth time before breaking for maple syrup candies. 

“Rock, paper scissors.  Rock, paper scissors.  Rock, paper scissors.  Rock, paper scissors.  Shit.”

There’s this trick where you drizzle the heated syrup on the snow.  Turns into good-as taffy. 

The penguin was still there.  It was still partially inflated. 

It had stopped making the sound, though.  That was nice.  It hadn’t been pleasant for my brain. 

“Hi,” I said again, again. 

It stared at me with that little penguin face. 

“Want some candy?”
It stared at me with that little penguin face.  Then it rotated its head seven hundred and twenty degrees and it popped off and fell into the snow so it could stare at me with its eyes in the back of its little penguin head and also the smaller penguin head that was sticking out of its neck stump. 

***

“You’re five seconds late.”
“Penguin was still there.  Its head fell off and now it has two.”
“Huh,” said Mark.  “Well, it’s the middle of winter.”
“Yeah.”

“’Nother movie?”
“Nah.”
“Knew you’d say that.”
Mark and I have been doing this for a while.  I know he knows that I’d say that.  He knew that too.  We both know that.  He’s just the only one that feels the need to reaffirm his knowledge, because he’s an insecure little jackass.
“Am not.”
See?

“I’m going to bed,” I said.
“Knew you’d say that.”

The sounds of the snow were too ordinary and everyday to lull me to sleep. 

But they were nice.

**

When I woke up the penguin was sitting in the corner of the room and it was surrounded by sixteen of its heads and all of them were staring at me and singing.  My eyes were flickering on and off like I’d turned the shower too high; and there was a sluggish sensation on my lip that I suspected was trickling blood.

“Fuck off,” I said, and I threw my boot at it.  It vanished inside its chest without a trace. 

“Little shithead.”
I got dressed and took twice my usual dose of coffee. 

“That’s twice your usual dose of coffee.”
“Thank you, commodore obvious.”

“Penguin?”
“Corner of the room, sixteen heads, unearthly wailing.”
“Rough.”

“Nah.  But it ate my boot.”
“You threw it at it, didn’t you?”
“No call for it to eat it.”
“I’d eat something if you threw it at me.”
I threw a mug at him.  He ducked. 

“Liar.”

***

When I went into my room again the penguin was gone, and things went back to normal for exactly eighty hours.

***

It was a movie night again, and Mark was taking longer than usual at the DVD player because the penguin had incorporated him into its torso. 

“Just let me do it,” I told him. 
“No.  This is my job.”
“You’ve got flippers, Mark.  Fuck off and let me help.”
“No!” he honked agitatedly, and I knew my nose was going to be bleeding again soon.

“Don’t do that shit.  You know I hate it when you do that shit.”
“Then don’t try and take my job!”
I threw my other boot at him.  It vanished inside his mouth. 

“Don’t throw things at me.”
“Don’t see why not.  It stopped you from being a liar again, didn’t it?”
He tried to ignore me.  Honestly, he’d been an even bigger asshole than usual ever since the penguin got him.  I hoped that didn’t happen to me whenever it got around to it.

“I can’t believe this sort of shit keeps happening,” he sighed.  “Every damned winter.”

“It’s a good place for it,” I said.  “Isolated.  Good preservation.  Easily spotted from orbit”

Mark burped and swallowed the DVD player. 
And of course, after a while, you learn to put up with just about anything.  

It was a dark and stormy morning.  Rain pitter-pattered down the windows and off the leather trenchcoat of the mysterious and shadowy figure who’d barged into my office, eyes glittering beneath a crooked, battered fedora. 

“Whozhat?” I mumbled, alertly. 

“The most important and dramatic case of your career,” he intoned in a voice like funeral bells filled with grinding tombstones falling into an ocean trench full of bass drums.

“Whuzzat?” I questioned him, eagerly. 

“I need you to find the identity of… THE MURDERKILLER.”
“Ugh,” I said, pulling myself fully halfway upright.  “Really?  Do I have to?”
“He’s your nemesis!”
“Yeah, but I didn’t catch him last time.  I don’t wanna.”
“I DEMAND you unmask your nemesis!”
“Fiiiiiiine,” I sighed.

“Good,” said the mysterious stranger.  Then he gurgled and fell over, an enormous knife sticking out of his back.  ‘Johnny’ Doesmurders, my trusty sidekick and sidey trustkick, had helpfully already seized hold of it and tugged it free smoothly. 

“Looks like the Murderkiller did this, boss,” he said helpfully. 

“How can you tell?”

“Has his name engraved on the side in neon.”
“Wow.  Sounds like evidence.  You mind holding onto that for me, ‘Johnny’?”
“Sure thing,” he said, slipping into the very conveniently empty leather knife sheath on his belt.  That was ‘Johnny’ for you.  Always prepared for anything.  “Where we headed?”
“To the first place any private eye goes on a case, dumbass,” I politely informed him.  “To the bar.”

***

“I need another clue I mean drink I mean clue please, shithead,” I told the bartender. 

“He’s emotionally distraught, see,” ‘Johnny’ told him.  “His dear old mother died recently or his favourite aunt or his beloved nephew.”

“Uh,” said the bartender, and he served me another glass of warm milk.

“Thanks,” I said, and downed it, washing away all my innumerable troubles in a soft tide of lactose.  Like the time I’d gotten bad takeout and suffered gastrointestinal distress in front of the court; or the time I falsely accused my good friend ‘Johnny’ Doesmurders of being the Murderkiller; or the time I forgot my own birthday; or the time the bartender had collapsed on the counter in front of me and spilled my warm milk all down my pants. 

“Hey, watch it!” I snapped at him.

“Here’s the problem, boss,” said ‘Johnny’, flipping him over expertly.  “Someone’s gone and shot him in the forehead.”

“Another clue, or an evidence, or whatever,” I said as I rifled through his pocket.  “Looks like he only had fifty clues in his wallet though, damnit.  Any witnesses?” 

“He shot him!” screamed a man cowering in the corner, pointing at ‘Johnny’. 

“No I didn’t,” said ‘Johnny’.

“Well, I’m out of ideas,” I said, scratching my brow and furrowing my brow and wincing at the sudden pain in my brow.  “Any thoughts on what we do next?”

BANG.

“Pardon?” I asked, looking up. 

“Let’s go to the hardware store for supplies,” suggested ‘Johnny’.  “Here, hold onto this gun and rub your fingerprints all over it; seems like a clue to me.”
I caught it and burnt my palm rubbing my fingers all over the barrel.  This job was hell. 

***

“Shovels,” said ‘Johnny’.

“Check.”
“Tarps.”
“Check.”
“Gallons and gallons and gallons of acid.”
I sneezed violently and dropped everything. 

“Aw no, boss.”
“Sorry,” I said.  “I’m allergic to acid.  That’s why I never clean the office.”
“Tactical thinking,” said ‘Johnny’ thoughtfully.  “Boss, do you have your card on you?  I’m temporarily unflush with cash.”
“No.”
“Cash?”

“No.”
“Boss, you got your wallet on you at all?”
“I left it behind when I was investigating at the bar, ‘Johnny’,” I said severely.  “Stop questioning my methods.  I definitely did that on purpose for good reasons which I’ll make up later when I’ve got more time to think and aren’t as sloshed on milk.”
“Ah,” said ‘Johnny’.  “Good thinkin’, boss.”
“I think he bought it,” I said.  “Listen, you’re a pretty convincing guy.  Can you ask the cashier to give us a loan?”
“Sure thing, boss,” said ‘Johnny’, straightening his shirt and unsheathing the evidence knife.  “I’ll be right back.  In the meantime, take all this stuff to the car: it’s vitally important to finding our next clue out in the middle of the desert, miles away from the nearest road.”

“Sure thing,” I said. “Just give me a minute to pick up all these gallons and gallons and gallons of acid.”

“They got carts, boss.”
“Shut up, ‘Johnny’.”

***

It was a beautiful night.  With my neck craned back I could count every star in the sky as they sprinkled cold light down on me like a thousand demon’s blessings, embraced in the grip of the eternal darkness that we all come from and all go back to.

“Boss?”
“Sorry, ‘Johnny’,” I said.  “I was busy with my neck craned back so I could count every star in the sky as they sprinkled cold light down on me like a thousand demon’s blessings, embraced in the grip of the eternal darkness that we all come from and all go back to.”
“Seems a bit trite, boss,” said ‘Johnny’.

“Go fuck yourself Doesmurders, what the hell you know about literature?”
“Not much,” ‘Johnny’ admitted.  “I’m more of a visual arts guy.  But speaking of, mind watching the road a little more closely?”

“Oh yeah,” I said.  Christ almighty, where WAS the road?  “Christ almighty, where IS the road?  I didn’t mean to say that, ignore it, ignore it, ignore it.  Shit.  Damn.  Shoot.”
“It’s near the pillar of smoke back thataways, boss,” said ‘Johnny’.  “Or you can just follow the trail of dismembered cacti and flattened roadrunners.”

“I used to love that cartoon,” I said wistfully.  “It reminds me of the old times, when I was youthful and innocent.”
“I know what you mean,” said ‘Johnny’.  “Actually, don’t bother going back to the road, boss.  I know where the crime scene is.”
“Wow,” I said, impressed.  “And we weren’t even looking for it!”
“Yeah!  It’ll be up ahead behind that big rock in about thirty minutes.”

***

“Is it here yet?”
“No,” said ‘Johnny’.

“Is it here yet?”
“No.”
“Is it here yet?”
“No.”

I pouted.  I was really tired; digging holes is a lot of work.  You have to bend your back over and over and over and hold a shovel right way up and everything.

“Okay, that’s probably deep enough,” said ‘Johnny’, measuring the pit with a squinted eyeball and some ambiguous hand movements.  “I reckon we’re ready for the crime now.”

“Great,” I said.  “Good thing we brought all these gallons and gallons and gallons of acid to tidy it up.  Help me out of this pit?”
“Nah, just wait in there for a second.  It’s the perfect spot.”

“Does fit me real well, doesn’t it?” I marvelled. 

“There is something I gotta tell you though, boss,” said ‘Johnny’, carefully unsheathing his knife, unholstering his gun, unholstering his other gun, and clutching all of them in both hands and his teeth. 

“‘Johnny’,” I said, wiping my brow with one hand, “we’re true pals.  You can tell me anything at all.  Get a load off your chest.”
“I, ‘Johnny’ Doesmurders am secretly, unbelievably, mind-bogglingly, unexpectedly… THE MURDERKILLER!”

Thunder rolled dramatically through my mind. 

“Oh,” I said.  “Wow.  Woah.  Gosh.  Gee.  Golly.  Damn.  Shit.  Shoot.  Gosh.”
“You said ‘gosh’ already, boss,” said ‘Johnny.’

“Thanks a ton.  Well, that explains more than it don’t.  Whaddaya want for dinner?”

‘Johnny’ gaped at me like a failed flounder.  “But… but… I’m the Murderkiller!” he sputtered.  “I’ve lied to you and systemically deceived you for years, boss!  I’ve murdered and killed everyone and everything that ever came close to you!  I’ve played you like a fiddle, a violin, a viola, and a cello all at once!  Don’t you CARE?”

“Well, it hurts a bit I figure,” I said.  “But you’re my pal, so I’ll overlook that.  And besides, that just explains why you’re always doing murdering and killing, and I like those things.  Hell, you sure have given me a lot of excuses to get some of my own done!  Now I can get some hot tips from the best.”
‘Johnny’ Doesmurders stared down at me with something bigger than awe.  “Gosh, boss,” he said.  “I thought it was me playing you for a sap, when all along it was the other way ‘round.”
“It’s no problem at all, ‘Johnny,’” I said.  “Now pull me outta this hole and let’s go home and order in!  You can murderkill the delivery guy after if you’d like.  I’d love to watch.”

A cliff, a crag, a corrugated hut.

A scientist, a sleep, a snore. 

And a delicate little cough on a seismograph that sent Dr. Clauseway from dead asleep to live-wire-waking all in an instant, hacking and sputtering and fingers already twitching for a keypad. 

There – there they were.  Little tremors getting stronger by the second.  Too specific and too straightforward for an earthquake; too firm and decisive and steady for a bit of the headland falling apart into the ocean. 

“Grads!” shouted Dr. Clauseway, voice scraping into a shriek from disuse and over-muttering in their day-to-day life.  “Where are my grads?!  Lazy gadabouts!  Putrid gits!  Get recording!  Get sourcing!  Acquire equipment!  Locate transport!  Do everything we ever planned, and do it five minutes ago!”

From couches and bunks and alcoves the grads leapt, shambling creatures with hazy eyes and heavy lids and strong backs broken in half from labour. 

There was no time at all and everything to do.  The moment had arrived.  The time had come.  The furious scree of angry lariforms filled the air as much as their white wings did; nests disturbed and displaced and thrown into the sea by the growing force beneath them. 

Big Louise was waking up.  And only a few decades later than expected. 

***

The topsoil was the first to go; centuries of accumulation being shaken straight into dust.  Only the hardiest and most deeply-rooted patches of scrubs and shrubs held out more than an instant; the rest billowed into the air and the sky and the sea itself in boiling dust clouds, shrouding the entire peninsula in red and brown and grey grit that sparkled in the rising sunlight as last night’s stormclouds peeled away from the horizon to let in fresh light. 

From the edge of the cloud movement came, so big and so fast that it seemed slow as continental drift.  The land was moving.  The land was falling.  The land was gone. 

And from the land emerged Big Louise, seven miles across and twelve legs slowly flexing, carapace breathing free again for the first time in what Dr. Clauseway had estimated to be a thousand years.  Spiracles sucking in gases; tastebuds registering molecules; brain bigger than the scientific observation post warming up to thinking speed again. 

Ready or not!

***

Hillary Wake was on her fifth dose of pills and eighteenth cup of coffee and her eyes were starting to vibrate in their sockets but fuck, fuck, double-fuck her to her grave if she was going to take them back into port with this pitiful snippet of a catch.  Her children would starve, her wife wouldn’t look her in the eye, and her grandmother would oscillate in her grave. 

So fuck last night’s storm, fuck the fish that were hiding like cowards from her nets, and fuck the sky for daring to shine at her with six overlapping suns that were buzzing at her in waspish harmony. 

Also fuck that wave coming at her. 

“Grab onto something,” she said, or tried to say.  Maybe she just croaked.  Anyways she yanked the helm nine or ten ways and got lucky and they didn’t capsize, just barely crested the top of the murderous thing and came eye to eye-cavity with Big Louise as she waded ponderously, thighs-deep as she began to step off the continental shelf. 

Hillary’s crew was making noises, but they were talking too fast to be understood.

“Yah,” she told them, eyes on the water.  Eyes on the frothing, churned water.  Silver scales shining as they rose up; the still-living in a frenzy tearing at the flesh of the deceased and ruptured, or scavenging at tidbits stirred up from the bottom.  “Yah.  Okay.  Yah.  Hey, shut up?  We’re following the big girl now.  Get the nets out.  Are they broken?  Get more nets out.  Are we out?  Weave some using the industrial loom and your spare shirts and blankets.  And stop shaking at me!  It’s hard enough to keep my hands steady.”

There was only one other boat out there at the moment – some kind of ugly corrugated thing covered in satellite dishes? – but there’d be more soon.  A second wasted was a catch missed. 

***

Water surged up Big Louise’s sides as she took the plunge into something that could actually hold her body up; her limbs barely used and already aching from the combined stress of keeping her upright and mobile in the thin liquid of an atmosphere.  Dirt and stone and crushed flora and fauna alike streamed in ribbons from every claw as she kicked off gently, annihilating half an ecosystem in the force of her launch. 

She’d stumbled, she’d lurched, but now she moved in earnest.  Her bow wave smoothed into a ripple that could eat rip tides for breakfast; her bulk slid into a softer realm; and soon all there was to be seen of Big Louise above the surface was her wake and her scavenger cohorts – winged and afloat – and the slight buzz in the air that was her call, somewhere below the hearing range of every animal on the planet that wasn’t her. 

***

The pebble fell off the ledge and into the cup that yanked the cord that pulled the trigger that fired the pellet into the dartboard that shook the ball free that slid down the ramp that launched it through the net that dropped it onto the lever that tapped Eustace’s favourite mug’s handle and knocked it to the floor of the cabin, smashing it into a hundred pieces. 

“It’s afoot!” shouted Eustace, leaping upright from his bunk and slamming his head directly into his brother’s mattress. 

“Ow.  Fuck.”
“She’s risen up at last, brother!  The game’s come!  The time is now!  We’re going to get ‘err done at last!  Finally we can put the harpoon to use, and the cabling, and the barbs, and the weights, and the thermal lances, and the railgun!  Oh my GOD the railgun!  Have you calibrated it?  Calibrate it!  And we need to do something else we need to uhhhh…”
“Sail to her,” said Eustace’s other brother, at the helm. 

“Yes!  Sail to her!”
“I already started that sixty-four minutes ago, when the seismograph tripped.  Should be in sight within the hour on current heading.”
“Good!  Do that!  And get some coffee going!”

***

A little less than full fathom five Big Louise cruised, gill-batteries chugging along at full tilt with a reckless eager love for life after spending so long buried and quiescent.  A city’s-worth of water spilled through their system with every heave of intake and outtake, nutrients sent this-way, oxygenation that-way, deoxygenated leftovers the-other-way. 

All of it burning, burning, burning in the furnaces of a metabolism that even half-awake was its own ecosystem; uncountable trillions of long-neglected bacteria waking from ancient dreams to find their home warm and quick again, filled with freshness, with hunger, with life. 

***

“Life!” shouted Janice through the megaphone.

“LIFE!” agreed her congregation, bobbing around her in their varying degrees of seaworthiness.  Everything in the mission’s harbour that could float had been put to work and then some. 

“Is come!” continued Janice. 

“PRAISE BE!” replied her congregation.

“And with it, death!” explained Janice. 

“PRAISE BE!” expounded her congregation. 

“Greet Her as She comes gracefully!”
“PRAISE BE!”

“Do not shrink or shirk from what She offers you!”
“PRAISE HER!”
“And may we find fulfillment in what She grants!”
“AYE!”
Janice put away her megaphone, took a nice big drink of scotch, then returned to examining the radar.  Big Louise had acquired some stragglers as she approached, which was to be expected – but there were others approaching her head-on, and that wasn’t. 

The universe held no mistakes, only hilarious truths.  So presumably this was one of them.  Janice ordered some of the more handy Brothers and Sisters to get out the billhooks and fire-axes, just in case they needed to supply their own punchline. 

***

Complex currents were at work around and inside Big Louise.  Hot and cold shunted through and around each other, balanced and counter-balanced and weighted and re-weighted.  Six hearts operated as much by calculated demands to the laws of physics as through any sort of muscular action. 

Some veins and arteries bulged thickly as others tapered off, rerouting a blood supply that could fill rivers and lakes.

Big Louise’s legs stilled, their claw-tipped paddles angling precisely to keep her stable and angled correctly.  And her tail began to stir. 

***

“Ten miles and closing fast.”

God, Betty was bored bored bored.  She just wanted the stupid crab or whatever it was to show up so they could shoot it or not shoot it or whatever they were told to do.  Why were they here anyways?  ‘Monitoring?’  ‘Peacekeeping?’  God, she shouldn’t have slept in, maybe some of it would have sunken in over breakfast.  Fuck fuck fuck she wished she hadn’t missed breakfast.  God damnit.  It had been a bacon day too, hadn’t it?  Crap in a crabbucket.  Yes, it was Wednesday all right.  Damnit piss shit fuck Christ NOODLES. 

The safety was off, but that was fine, she was just fidgeting with it because she was bored – not being careless, she was deliberately keeping her hands away from the trigger! – and so when her gunnery officer affectionately slapped her on the back it completely wasn’t her fault that she grabbed the handle while trying to avoid having her face mashed into the console. 

***

Big Louise had very good vision of a very specific kind.  She could see the hum and bustle of the water as vividly as anything; she could spot stagnant water miles away; she could pinpoint the exact point where depth changed miles below her down to the temperature change at the tips of her legs. 

But she was a bit fuzzy on anything half her size or smaller.  So from her perspective, the odd buzzing sensation that skipped along the water just above her back came from nowhere.  Which was peculiar, so she stopped moving. 

Her wake didn’t, so it slapped lightly against her. 

***

The torpedo slipped lightly through the oncoming wave.

“HARD STARBOARD,” shouted Eustace’s other brother, yanking the wheel with his left hand and shoving Eustace and his railgun aside with his right. 

“HARD TO PORT, DAMN YOU!” yelled Janice at her driver, buckling on her fifth lifejacket. 

“HNEEEEEEEERGH” snorted Hillary Wake, spinning the wheel both of the correct ways at once to avoid all six of the incoming explosives. 

“ABANDON SHIP,” hollered Doctor Causeway, vaulting three grads and cutting the lifeboat free alone. 

“Oh.  Shit,” said Betty.

“Eh?” asked her gunnery officer. 

And Big Louise’s backup eye broke water. 

***

It was the smallest of her visual clusters, measuring a mere six meters across, but it was suspended at the tip of a prehensile tendril instead of buried within a protective crater, and so was ideal for little passing moments of curiosity like this. 

It hung there in the sky, passing over the small and disparate fleet that surrounded her.  For a moment the air was very still and very clear.  Thoughts of violence drained away at the sheer spectacular scale of life, of the magnitude of the force beneath them all.  Why could anything be done that would cause harm?  What would the point of it all be?  As well might an ant engage in vendetta upon the doorstep of God. 

Then Eustace fired the railgun at it and missed and hit the small and corrugated research boat, and perspective was restored. 

***

Still puzzled, Big Louise sank down to where even she couldn’t see anything, over a full body-length below the dry thinness, and there she laid her first clutch.  At last she had succeeded; a long rest had given her troubled body the strength it needed to endure the turbulent incubation of thousands of tons of eggs.  With a little luck they might not inherit her small stature; the result of a hungry childhood.  Here the seas promised rich a welcome for her own children. 

There were odd plinking sensations against her carapace as she laid; the fragmented remains of some sort of hard rain from above, but Big Louise was too large to notice it so she didn’t. 

There was a sort of nasty iron taste in the water for a few miles though. 

“She’s up!”

Beth finished her coffee and promised herself there’d be another one.  Then she stood up, sighed, adjusted her belt, rubbed her face, ran out of simple ways to stall and walked the seventy thousand miles to the county jail cell one room away. 

Inside it was Hannah Thorne, who was currently wearing nothing but blood and a patchy woolly blanket. 

Again. 

“Whoops,” she said, a little sheepishly. 

“No, Hannah,” said Beth. 

“I’m sorry?” she tried. 

“No, Hannah.”
“I’m REALLY sorry?”
“No, Hannah.”
“I apologize for saying last time was the last time?”

“No, Hannah.”
The embarrassment was starting to fade into annoyance.  “What is it then?”
“It’s ‘I’ll cooperate with the murder investigation, Officer Gubbin,’” said Beth. 

Hannah’s entire face froze while her brain rebooted.  Except for her mouth, which reflexively said “murder?”

“You had someone’s leg in your mouth, Hannah.  Mostly down to the gristle, but pretty fresh.  Now we have to go find out who didn’t come back home last night, which means I’m spending all morning driving.  With you.  Put some pants on, we’re going for the long walk of shame here.”

Beth Gubbin didn’t consider herself prejudiced, and in fact prided herself on personally getting her last co-worker fired for being two hundred pounds of bigotry with a badge.  But some days she was pretty sick and tired of the mayor’s daughter being a werewolf. 

***

They did town first.  That took about six minutes.  Nobody was missing, which Beth had more or less figured.  Hannah was an outdoorsy sort of girl, no matter which skin she was wearing, and the last six (six?  How had it turned into six?) times Beth had done this dance with her she’d been off frolicking in the countryside, turning someone’s livestock or pet into hamburger.

“I’m sorry,” Hannah mumbled. 

“Mmm?”
“I’m sorry for-”

“It wasn’t you.”
“It WAS, I was just-”

“No, I’m blaming Bart for this.  I’ve told him over and over he needs to invest in a proper silver chain, but your idiot father thinks you’re still six and a little cast iron necklace can hold you in your room all night.  The chump.  The dolt.  The absolute imbecile.”
“Hey, he-”

“Next time eat HIM, okay?  I’ve never voted for him anyways.”
“Uh,” said Hannah.  And that was that until they pulled up to the Mason farm, knocked on the door, and were immediately led round the back to the fields, where a tractor sat lonely under a big blue sky. 

Next to the tractor was about half a woman. 

“Urgh.”

“Yep.  Need a moment?”
“I did that?”

“Possibly.”
“Possibly?”
“Look closer here, at the edge?”
“Hurrrklh!”
“Okay, step back again, never mind, breathe, breathe.  Point is-”

“Bluuugh.”
“-point is that there aren’t any teeth marks.”

“Maybe I…used my… claws?”
“No.  I’ve seen carcasses left by your little adventures half a hundred times: you’re a gnawer, Hannah.  And besides, no scratches either.  This looks like a Fargoing.”
“A what?”
“You ever seen the movie Fargo?”
“The WHAT?”
Beth sighed.  “Before your time.  Okay, look, I think what happened here is Peggy finally lost her shit at May’s drinking and clocked her one, then fed the body through the rotary tiller a bit.  The blood doesn’t look fresh, so she probably hung onto it until full moon rolled around and she could plausibly blame it on you.”
“We’re standing on a murderer’s farm?”
“Yeah, pretty much.  I’m going to phone in Danny to come around and do the legwork; you can go sit in the car if you’d like.”

Hannah did that, which meant Beth could swear as much as she liked when Danny gave her the news. 

“Something wrong?” asked Peggy, trailing after her. 

“Bad news is all.  You’re a murder suspect, by the way.  Danny’ll be by; don’t try to run off or anything because I know for a fact that hunk of junk you own wouldn’t last four minutes on the highway.  Thanks for having us.  C’mon, Hannah.”
“We’re going back?”

Beth peeled out of the driveway slowly and begrudgingly as Peggy shouted something unintelligible at them.  “Nope.  Going down to the Harner place.”
“Why?”
“Dead guy in their driveway.”

***

A very, very dead guy in the Harner driveway.  Unlike May Mason, most of him was still there.  But it had been considerably rearranged. 

“Horlph!”
“Breathe, breathe, breathe.  And point over there, away from the crime scene.  You okay?”
“No.”
“That’s alright.  Now, this one pretty obviously isn’t your fault.”
“No… teeth…marks?”
“Yep.  And also buddy here still has both legs.  You’re cleared.  Now, what’s the first thing you noticed about this body, Hannah?”
Hannah turned even paler.  “Well… the purple bit.  I think it’s the liver?”
“Yep.  Pretty striking.  But let me be more specific: what’s the first thing you noticed about this body besides its physical… state, Hannah?”

“I’m uhm.  Not sure I got past that.”
“That’s fair.  Well, I noticed that I have no idea who this is.”
“Should you?”
“I’m half of the full-time police force of this county, Hannah.  I know everybody.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be.  You’ve got a pretty good excuse for not getting out much.  Anyways, this guy’s wearing pretty beat-to-shit clothing and besides the mangling – which I think was done with a kitchen knife – the actual death itself probably came from the bullet through the chest, which I’d wager will match to Mickey Harner’s favourite shotgun.  Paranoid old bastard probably blew away a tramp asking to stay the night or trying to sleep in his garage, then tried to pin it on you.”

“So.  Uhm.  What do we do?”
“I phone Danny, you get back in the car and start brainstorming where we have lunch.”

***

It was McDonalds. 

“Really?”
“Dad never lets me come here.”
“Bart’s a damned health nut.”
“No, he just doesn’t like Mr. Durham much.”

“Oh.  He’s still holding a grudge over that?”
“Over what?  He just complains about him a lot.”
“Yeah, he would.  Tim Durham slept with Tracy Gilmore back in ’85.”
“Mrs. Gilmore dated my dad?”
“No, but he really wished she did.”
“Oh.”
Beth sighed.  “Sorry, Hannah.  I wish there were a more delicate way to put it, but your dad’s sort of a shithead.”

“Yeah,” she said, head bowed. 

“Have the rest of my fries.”
“Thanks.”
“Thank YOU.  I can’t afford the cholesterol.  Sit tight, I’m going to the restroom.  If I’m not back in six minutes here’s my phone, call Danny.”

Eight minutes later Hannah knocked on the bathroom door. 

“C’mon in.  Did you call Danny?”
“No.”
“Teenager.  Mind your step.”
Hannah walked in, minded her step, stepped in someone’s kidney, and threw up in the sink.
“The toilet was RIGHT THERE, Hannah.”
“Eurururublugough.”
“Fine, fine.  Jesus what a mess, there must be like six people in here.  In and around.”
Hannah raised her head for breath and was eye to eye with one eye on the sink counter. 

“Haaaaglorf!”
“Maybe just don’t look at anything for a little while.  Shut your eyes, okay?”
“The… smell.”
“Oh yeah.  Okay, maybe plug your nose too.  Yeah, this is real fresh.  I’d say it happened in the last hour or so so you’re clear again, no worries.  I’d say the new shift manager did it; he looked awful nervous when we walked in the door and this looks like Jason Mayhew’s torso over here – got that missing nipple. He must’ve come in early for his shift and found him chopping up the other five.”
Hannah threw up again.

“As for motive…mmm.  Not sure.  Sometimes people just have one little thing too many happen, and god knows fast food gives you enough of those.  I’ll phone Danny and then I’ll get out there and cuff the guy to something, you can just-”
“YORKGH!”
“-not move for a few minutes.”

***

Later, in the car, Beth saw something other than nausea on Hannah’s face. 

“Something on your mind?”
She shook her head.

“Like hell.  Come on, spit it out.”
“How did you know Jason Mayhew had a missing nipple?”
Beth shrugged.  “There’s only one beach in town.  You notice things.”
“Oh.”
“That, and I slept with him in ’88.”
“OH.”
“He’d just lost it that year; his ex bit it off.”
“Why?”
“Throes of passion, I think.  Nobody you know; she got picked up for car theft after that and moved out of town.”
“Sorry.”
“About what?”
“Him.  Jason.   Dying.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it.  Stuff happens around here.  And just between you and me?  He was a pretty lousy boyfriend.  He earned that missing nipple fair and square.”

Beth rounded a curve in the road and slammed on the brakes so hard Hannah almost threw up again. 

“Sorry about that.  Road’s blocked.”
Very, very blocked.   The car was upside down and backwards and in the wrong lane and its windshield had been turned into a fine glittery shrapnel that coated the asphalt for a hundred feet. 

“Come on, let’s check it out.”
“Do I have to?”
“Yep.  Your stomach’s been getting a good toughening-up this morning, a little more won’t hurt.  And you can pace out the skidmarks for me.”
Hannah paced out the skidmarks for her while Beth poked around the car. 

“Wow. You don’t see this every day.  Hey!  Hannah!  Come and take a look at this.”
Hannah didn’t come and take a look at that.

“Oh come on.  It’s not that bad.  Besides, you don’t get to see something like this every day.”
“I just saw six disassembled bodies in a fast food bathroom.”
“Yeah and I found you with someone’s leg in your mouth, it’s been a busy morning for everybody.  Now C’MERE.”

Hannah c’mered.  The woman inside the car was more or less in one piece and had both legs, which was a relief, and had a ribcage that had been nearly reduced to a flat surface, which was less of a relief.

“UGH.”
“Hey, no vomit!  Good going, you can take over for me in ten years.”
“No thanks.  Isn’t Dan going to do that?”
“I wouldn’t let him take over the coffee maker.  Now, what do you think happened here?”
“Car crash?”
“Yep, but that happened post-mortem.  See this fur?”
“She has both legs!”
“Well, you could have killed more than one person, but that’s not what I was getting at – ease up.  This isn’t from a wolf anyways.  Moose!  Betty here ran into a moose and it went right through her windshield and into her chest.  Instantly fatal – not for the moose, mind you; poor bastard probably wobbled off into the woods to die.”

“Is that what left the blood on the road?”
“Probably.  Unless it came from the passenger.”

“What?”

“The side door’s open and it wasn’t wrenched; someone got out of here.  I’m guessing there was no phone or it was broken, since there were no emergency calls.  You know what road we’re on here, Hannah?”
“No.  Dad doesn’t let me out much.”
Beth patted her arm.  “Sort of a shithead.  Don’t worry about it.  But you SHOULD worry about where we are, because we’re on Hillmoore’s Line.  I think the poor bastard limped out of the wreckage, went looking for help, and stumbled right into one of the Hillmoore boys that had spotted the lights and was looking for a midnight snack.  Not much we can do about that but get a search warrant going and hope they got sloppy this time.  Usually they’re pretty careful about hiding the bodies – the fuckers own their own pig farm.”

“What if I got him instead of them?”
“You’re a strong girl, Hannah.  I read the paper, I know about the school track team.  But even gone full-moon-furry you aren’t going to pick a fight for a corpse on Hillmoore’s Line without starting something you couldn’t handle.  Those kids are maniacs.  More pertinently they’re well-armed maniacs.”
Hannah muttered something. 

“No.  And besides, there’d be more blood anyways.  You’re a messy eater, and I’m not talking about the French fries.”

***

Danny called on the way back into town. 

“Shit,” said Beth as she hung up.

“You aren’t supposed to use a phone when you’re driving.”
“It was just a call; it’s texting that kills people.”
“Distracted driving is –”

“We’re going back into town; someone’s left your P.E. teacher’s head on the school roof.”
“Oh no!”
“You liked Jim-Bob?”
“No!  Nobody did!”
“Yep.  Going to be a lot of suspects.  Mind you, fewer of them could get onto the roof.”

“Was it me?”
“Who knows?  We’re dropping you off at home first anyways; there’s going to be reporters there already and your dad’ll never stop bugging me if I drag you near a camera like this.”
“What?”
“You’re wearing my old work clothes, you smell like vomit, and you broke out of your house and removed someone’s leg last night.  Some of those things are more obvious than others.”

“Oh.”
“Yep.”
Bart’s car was still in the driveway, meaning he’d probably been too angry to go to work.  Beth was going to owe Danny a few more donuts this week if he’d been dealing with the mayor in between calls all morning. 

“Right, we’re here.  I’ll come inside and talk him down before I go, okay?”
“…thanks.”
“No problem.”
Two minutes of waiting at the door disproved Beth’s statement. 

“Oh come on,” said Hannah, and she shook the handle a particular way three times and it popped open like old Tupperware. 

“Surprised he hasn’t fixed that.”
“He doesn’t know about it.  You won’t tell him, will-”

Beth gave it a moment, then stepped inside a room that had been turned inside out twice over, except for Bart Thorne, who had been turned inside out four times and then put back together for good measure. 

Exactly one of his legs was missing. 

“Hmm,” said Beth.  “I’ll phone Danny.  You want to come with me to the school?  Don’t see why not at this point.”